skopia
Hofstadter strips the myths off American statesmen from Jefferson to Franklin Roosevelt and finds one propertied creed underneath. The Emancipation Proclamation, he writes, had all the moral grandeur of a bill of lading.
Intelligence solves problems and Americans admire it. Intellect questions them, and Hofstadter's Pulitzer-winning history tracks the resentment it draws through frontier revival preaching, business self-help, and a century of fights over the schools.
An asthmatic Manhattan boy remakes himself as a Dakota rancher, a Rough Rider, and the youngest president in American history. Morris swept the major prizes for this volume alone.
I have little interest in streamlining government, Goldwater declares, for I mean to reduce its size. A hundred pages of refusal that dragged the Republican Party rightward and made Reagan's presidency thinkable.